The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Jan 24, 2025

 

The Reluctant Fundamentalist first Edition cover 2007

When Mohsin Hamid, the young  British Pakistani writer, began his second novel the demolition of the World Trade Tower by the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States had not yet occurred. He re-wrote the novel again  and again and took seven years to complete it. Ultimately, the novel turned on Changez Khan’s dawning realisation that something had changed fundamentally in the acceptability of Muslims in America after those attacks. The country would no longer be the land of his youthful dreams.

The twin towers attack of Sep 11, 2001 when airliners were flown into the towers by terrorists – the south tower is on fire and the north tower billows smoke

In  between he has a slow-burning love affair with a young woman called Erica. But she has still not come out of her depression following the grief over her boyfriend Chris, who died in the 9/11 attack. Changez loses track of Erica, but continues to think of her fondly, even after returning to Pakistan, holding onto the hope that she might one day come to him. 

When the North Tower collapsed this fire engine was damaged beyond repair — it is now an exhibit at the 9/11 Museum. Among first responders 441 died on that day

What makes Changez give up on his dreams is an eye-opening conversation he has with the head of the literary division of a company (Juan-Bautista), he has been sent to evaluate in Chile by his Wall Street company.  In a conversation he is told of young Christian boys who were captured by the Ottoman Turks in battle and then brainwashed into becoming Janissaries to work for their new masters. The implication is Changez has been similarly indoctrinated by his Wall Street firm to work against his own interests; he has become a hired gun. Juan-Bautista prompts Changez to examine his own identity and his relationship with America, which helps Changez see himself as a kind of "cultural outsider" exploited by American power structures. 

From there a transformation takes place and perhaps the poetry of Pablo Neruda one of whose houses south of Valparaiso he visits, has something to do with his deeper appreciation of his own poetic roots (his father was a poet in the Punjab).

Sumbal Maqsood of Government College University, Lahore, wrote in a paper titled Interrogating the Fundamentals of Identity: Changez’s Defining Act in the Reluctant Fundamentalist about Changez Khan’s dilemma:

“The standardized tests of America (like SAT) were traps to attract the intellectual cream of other nations, leaving the home countries deprived of brain power, while the migrants became servers of a tentacled capitalist cause. Changez realized gradually that he was just enabling the tentacles to grow more out of bounds.” 

The Reluctant Fundamentalist was adapted as a 2012 film in the political thriller drama genre, directed by Mira Nair and starring Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, and Liev Schreiber

The novel was later turned into a film directed by Mira Nair available for viewing free on Youtube. Many scenes are changed: Juan-Bautista in Valparaiso is turned into a book publisher in Istanbul who publishes in translation great authors from the Middle East and Asia. The book becomes more a thriller in the latter half of the film about secret CIA intervention in Lahore to rescue one of their operatives – there is no such story in the novel. In the film Changez Khan is less of a non-violent protester about American interventionism, and more of an activist goading students until he steps unwillingly into the terrorist backdrop to fundamentalism in Pakistan. Readers may on the whole prefer the novel because it leaves things unresolved at the end.

In the film Changez (played by Rizwan Ahmed, the British Pakistani actor) learns that the Istanbul publisher whose company they were evaluating, has published a Turkish translation of his father, Ajmal Khan's, poetry

Humorous Poems – Dec 2, 2024

Six Humorous Poets –  clockwise from top left, Soyinka, Nash, Masefield, Tolkien, Carryl, Paterson

The December session is as much about wearing fancy costumes as it is about reading humorous poems and readers have fun seeing themselves in unaccustomed attire, strutting before the audience. We meet in person always at such gatherings and spouses are invited to share the fun, and ex-readers too.

Ogden Nash is ever popular at our December sessions, with his unlikely rhymes and ridiculous situations, for example, speaking of husbands –
… they always drink cocktails faster than they can assimilate them,
And if you look in their direction they act as if they were martyrs and you were trying
          to sacrifice, or immolate them,

Indian husband deeply ensconced in the affection of his wife

…
Husbands are indeed an irritating form of life,
And yet through some quirk of Providence most of them are really very deeply
           ensconced in the affection of their wife.

Tolkien, whose seminal book The Hobbit we recently read, was also the purveyor of whimsical poems composed by one Tom Bombadil, a bearded hobbit short in stature in a blue coat and yellow boots who undertook a journey in a gondola across thirteen rivers, and among other things met a butterfly he fancied and proposed to her:
he begged a pretty butterfly 
that fluttered by to marry him.
She scorned him and she scoffed at him, 
she laughed at him unpitying; 
so long he studied wizardry 
and sigaldry and smithying.

One of the pleasures Tolkien readers derive is that of meeting a host of old English words like sigaldry, meaning enchantment or witchcraft, and habergeon, a sleeveless coat of chain mail

One of our prizewinners (Devika) wore a devil’s cape and makeup to go with it, reciting a poem about outwitting The Devil, with a mere blast of the word ‘Amen.’

That men too undergo a harrowing experience at childbirth is not known or commiserated with. You have to hear Edgar Guest’s poem on Becoming A Dad to know how deeply it affects the man on the threshold of fatherhood:
I vow I never shall forget
The night he came. I suffered, too,
Those bleak and dreary long hours through;
I paced the floor and mopped my brow
And waited for his glad wee-ow!

Pamela regretted she could not dress as a one-humped camel, known as a dromedary. The Camel’s Complaint is that their owners never build a shelter, but just let them loose.
… a Camel comes handy
Wherever it’s sandy—
Anywhere does for me !
…

If the camel's nose is under the tent, the rest of the stinky camel will follow!

… a Camel’s all lumpy
And bumpy and humpy—
Any shape does for me !

Banjo Paterson who writes humorous poems about the Australian outback had one about an old geezer who decided to forsake a horse to ride a bicycle, with unfortunate consequences: 
It struck a stone and gave a spring that cleared a fallen tree,
It raced beside a precipice as close as close could be;
And then as Mulga Bill let out one last despairing shriek
It made a leap of twenty feet into the Dean Man's Creek.

Mulga Bill careening downhill on a bicycle

After the ride he decides:
A horse's back is good enough henceforth for Mulga Bill.

Most amusingly told is a poem by Wole Soyinka, the Nobel-winning author from Nigeria, about his early experiences of subtle racism when he wanted to rent a flat in England. He’s asked by the landlady if he is dark, or very light, and to clarify Soyinka answers:
You mean – like plain or milk chocolate?

What colour are you – white, milk chocolate or dark chocolate?

‘West African sepia’ is an alternative description that befuddles the landlady, until he finally pleads:
"Madam, … wouldn't you rather
See for yourself?"

John Masefield is known primarily as a poet of sailing and his poems acquaint readers with terms used about sailing ships, such as poop, taffrail, scuppers, and fo'c'sle. He wrote in rhyming meter; here it's AABB. The poet narrates the bloody encounters when the pirates capture and scuttle merchant ships, and makes the point that the Board of Trade in UK, ultimately banned piracy: 
The schooners and the merry crews are laid away to rest. 

Long John Silver with eyepatch, peg leg, cutlass and macaw

The poem may be taken as a nod to Robert Louis Stevenson of Treasure Island fame, the yarn where Long John Silver is the one-legged example of a stereotypical pirate.

Michal as Frieda Kahlo in costume and unibrow being humped over the border wall with Mexico by Trump

Group picture at the end of the reading

 The spread after the reading was a knockout potluck

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, November 22, 2024

 

Lessons in Chemistry book covers in different countries – Covers, clockwise from top left, in the United States, in Britain, in Estonia, and in German

Briefly, in the words of the author, Bonnie Garmus:
“I set the book in the late 50s, early 60s and there's a woman, Elizabeth Zott, a chemist who's not allowed to be a chemist because she's unwed and pregnant, and she gets fired from her job for that crime, and she ends up taking a job as a very reluctant TV cooking show host.

But instead of teaching the housewives at home how to cook, she teaches them chemistry because she wants to remind them of their innate capability and in doing so, she changes the status quo.”

The novel is set in the fifties in balmy California where the great research universities and labs are; and no end of places that invite people to have a good time. In this setting arrives Elizabeth Zott, keen to make her career as a research chemist but having to battle all the way against the failures in her childhood upbringing – which she could do nothing about besides surviving – and the later disabilities heaped on her by the science establishment refusing to recognise her as a gifted and determined scientist.

Though she has already published papers and secured her M.Sc. in Chemistry from a prestigious university (University of California at Los Angeles, UCLA for short), and should have been working towards a Ph.D. at the same university, that attempt is botched by her guide and professor attempting to molest her sexually. She flees after poking a sharp number-two pencil six inches into his belly.

The only position she could get was as a lab technician in the fictional Hastings Institute, where Nobel-prize winning work is accomplished by brilliant scientists like Calvin Evans. Her encounter with him is the amusing story of the great man dismissing Elizabeth as a secretary when she appears to borrow some glass beakers for her work. It’s a put-down at first sight. The stand-off is tense until an encounter when he throws up on her dress after having one too many. She does not melt, but merely handles him as a patient.

Soon he takes her seriously and finds in her not only someone who understands his work and can critique it, but more, understands his own complex personality stemming from an even more cruel upbringing where he was molested by a pedophile priest in an orphanage after his parents (adoptive as it turns out) died. But he makes out all right and even goes to Cambridge University in UK and returns to the fictional town of Commons in California and a low paying job, selecting it purely because a pen-pal (who later became a Presbyterian clergyman) told him that Commons has the best weather for rowing. Rowing you see, is not only the author Bonnie Garmus’ passion, but one she devolves on Calvin Evans, and through him to Elizabeth Zott. There is an enormous amount of rowing lore and terminology in the novel, and descriptions of the brutal regimens of training required to succeed. 

Lewis Pullman as Calvin Evans and Brie Larson as Elisabeth Zott working in the lab from the Apple TV series

The pair make chemical headway in the lab and with each other. If chemistry is change as Elizabeth asserts then the two of them change and now attain a deep relationship with each other while intently pursuing their chemical research in Hastings. 

Elizabeth Zott and Calvin Evans collaborate in Hastings Institute

A stray dog they acquire and a leash that the town mandates combine to cause a freak accident while Calvin is jogging, and that causes the major turning point in the novel.

Calvin dies, but will Elizabeth be allowed to continue her work, funded by a secretive donor to for research in Abiogenesis – the theory that life originated from non-living matter, such as inorganic substances and simple organic compounds? No. The head of the chemistry department appropriates her research and publishes it as his own. She is thrown out of a job.

She has been left pregnant by Calvin Evans with the child named Mad, short for Madeline. How to support herself and a child? A chance encounter with the producer of afternoon TV programmes for housewives and children opens up a new horizon, a TV programme called Supper at Six, in which she opens up the vistas of Chemistry that underlie cooking, and goes on the air every weekday on a special set. 

Brie Larson as Elizabeth Scott hosts the TV Show ‘Supper at Six’

She transforms the show into a platform for science lessons for housewives while challenging gender biases. The show contains oodles of chemical knowledge about the proteins, amino acids and enzymes that make up food and how they transform under heat and various conditions into the tasty dinners every woman can make from fresh ingredients. The various segments of the show are very entertaining but they are all done in an air of seriousness, acknowledging how full of value is the time mothers pend on their family in preparing nourishing meals.

As in her previous career as a chemist, in TV production also there are bullying bosses who are constantly disparaging employees and asserting their male superiority. This culminates in the station chief of the TV, one Lebensmal (meaning ‘bad life’ in German), attempts to rape her. She is nobody, and he will have her. Fortunately, the brandishing of the 14-inch kitchen knife that every professional chef carries, is sufficient to repel his penile attack and render him inoperative.

Her extremely successful show is now syndicated nationally and Elizabeth Zott steps out of gentle penury into the limelight of a royalty earning TV star. But her ambition to return to chemistry  and take her research forward in the field of Abiogenesis, cannot long remain in abeyance. The erstwhile generous donor, Avery Parker of the Parker Foundation, who was keen to fund her work, turns out to be the (unwed) mother of Calvin Evans. She buys Hastings Institute and cleans it up, getting rid of the hostile, male chauvinist head of chemistry, Dr. Donatti, and putting Elizabeth in charge.

Madeline Zott and Six-Thirty, the dog, have a close protective relationship

The dog and the genius child of Elizabeth Zott and Calvin Evans have major roles. The novel was written to highlight how torturous the struggle was to recognise that women have minds and aspirations of their own, without reference to men in their lives. Women are as keen in intellect and as determined in their work habits as any male professional. 

It might be the basic tenet of feminism to take women seriously, as Elizabeth wished to be. There has been some progress in America and the West, and in other parts of the world in the last seventy years. But look at the way the Republican candidate for President in the Nov 5 elections in USA treats women. How many cases have been brought against him by women he molested? And his VP candidate has a such a low opinion of women that it almost amounts to the Nazi theme that officially encouraged and pressured women to fill the roles of mother and wife only. Women were excluded from all other positions of responsibility, including political and academic spheres. Nazi Germany promoted the cult that women were for Küssen, Kochen, und Kinder – kissing, cooking, and kids.

These ante-diluvian attitudes that persist in advanced countries, are demonstrated not only by the examples of leaders at the top, but in the statistics of the gender pay gap: according to current data, women in the United States are typically paid around 20% less than men for the same work. The gender pay gap in the EU is 16%. In India it is 18%. And so on. 

There are worse manifestations: in Afghanistan it is a crime for women to seek secondary education. In many countries women are forced to wear clothes to suppress their femininity – not because they want to, but because a male-dominated society decides what they shall wear.

Poetry Session – 25 October, 2024

 Arundhaty chose a prize-winning poem by Marilyn K Walker called The Clothesline, lamenting the obsolescence of that humble backyard device which allowed neighbourly information to be passed on unwittingly:

When neighbors knew each other best

By what hung on the line!

Marilyn K. Walker – The Clothesline cover

Devika featured one of India’s best known poets, Keki Daruwalla, who died recently in Delhi on Sept 24. You may read his obituary here. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1984, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1987 and the Padma Shri – the highest civilian honour – in 2014. His poem on Migrations conveys the deep anguish of things left behind, including precious memories, when people are uprooted, as his family was from Lahore where he was born in 1937.

Somebody said cats are the only animals that look down on humans. Geetha’s poem by Vikram Seth concerns a cat endearingly observed with its patronising actions recorded; it takes full advantage of the narrator to avail of goodies:
He is permitted food and I
The furred indulgence of a side. 

Vikram Seth – Spoiled Cat

Joe thought the time was ripe to hear from poet Thien, when dissents across the world are being put down in societies as varied as USA, UK, Russia, and Germany. In India too a series of speech cancellations of well-known scholars in the name of conformity, has given rise to censorship. The Vietnamese poet Nguyen Chi Thien was willing to suffer years of imprisonment for exercising his right to speak freely. Why are poets so feared by mighty governments?

Kavita presented Philip Larkin in a much-anthologised dark poem which negates the joys of expectations with which lovers wait and gamblers hesitate. Contradicting the proverb All things come to those who wait, the golden future never arrives, but what is certain to come is that one black ship (of death) towing
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

Philip Larkin with his Rolleiflex camera, 1957

Philip Larkin, England’s laureate of despair, is ironically observing the absurdity of society and culture, and thinking that all expectation will turn cold, which runs counter to WS who has Helena say in All’s Well That Ends Well:
Oft expectation fails and most oft there
Where most it promises, and oft it hits
Where hope is coldest and despair most fits.

Emily Dickinson, the monastic poet of Amherst has been a great favourite at KRG. Joe once wrote about a visit he and KumKum paid to her haunts. That blog post has exhaustive biographical material as well, including the online digital availability of her work from Harvard University in collaboration with other institutions. She began a famous poem of hers (#1263):
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Here KumKum presented a second one (#320) where the poet writes:
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter afternoons:
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –

Priya’s poem Shades of Anger by the Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah was very relevant to the contemporary woes that beset her people whose homes are being destroyed and people killed by American-made 2000-pound bombs that continue to be delivered on demand to Israel in order to reduce Gaza to rubble:

I am an Arab woman of colour and we come in all shades of anger.
And did you hear my sister screaming yesterday
as she gave birth at a check point

…
Yes my liberators are here to kill my children
and call them “collateral damage”

Saras took up the master poet W.H. Auden whose first submission to Faber & Faber was rejected by T.S. Eliot (who was its Director) in 1927 only to have Auden’s first collection Poems published by the same firm in 1930. The poem Funeral Blues was recited in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) by Matthew (played by actor John Hannah) who is mourning the death of his partner Gareth, a much older man played by Simon Callow:
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and Sunday rest,

Shoba recited two wonderful poems by Elizabeth Jennings, who was popular with the general reader for writing about the things that preoccupy most readers – family, faith, love, loss, illness, hope, atonement, redemption. Her Catholic faith comes through and animates her poems. Of the self-portraits by Rembrandt in old age she writes:
Self-portraits understand
And old age can divest,
With truthful changes, us of fear of death.

Rembrandt self-portrait 1659 from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The pouches fill, the skin is uglier.
You give it all unflinchingly. You stare
Into yourself, beyond.

Our last poet was Rudyard Kipling whose most famous poem is Gunga Din in which he exalts the compassionate role of a bhisti in the army at the battlefront. Zakia chose If—, a poem that is almost mandated in middle schools in India for elocution contests.

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
…
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

When all these conditions are fulfilled Kipling assures us your manhood is guaranteed. Kipling wrote this poem as a piece of advice to his dear son, John Kipling, on how to navigate life with integrity and character. He was killed in World War I at the age of eighteen during the Battle of Loos on September 27, 1915.

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien – Sep 24, 2024

 

The Hobbit 1937 First Edition

Tolkien in The Hobbit was writing a high-fantasy adventure whose origins, linguistic as well as mythological, lie in Old English and Nordic tales dating from ca. 1,000AD. He himself translated Beowulf, an early work completed in 1926 but Tolkien never considered its publication.  His son Christopher edited and had it published by HarperCollins posthumously in May 2014. 

Beowulf- A Translation and Commentary, together with Sellic Spell

That classic Old English epic poem tells the tale of how Beowulf the warrior  kills Grendel, the marauding sea monster and its mother, but dies in the end fighting a dragon driven to fury by a servant stealing a cup. This bears a resemblance to Bilbo Baggins stealing the Arkenstone from the hoard of treasure that Smaug the fiery dragon was guarding in his lair.

Smaug the dragon laying waste Laketown

Tolkien wrote The Hobbit in 1937 in a dialect of English that is unlike anything a reader will encounter in modern prose. Many of the verbs are conjugated in an ancient fashion, for example: “he knew how evil and danger had grown and thriven in the Wild.“ 

Tolkien as a schoolboy

Tolkien was early introduced to Anglo-Saxon grammar at his school and his interest in Gothic, Anglo-Saxon, and Welsh, remained strong throughout middle and high school. No surprise then that he became a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and brought out editions of the Old English classics. When he invented the hobbits they seemed to him to embody the gentleness, understated reliability and courage he loved.

About how the tale arose in his mind he wrote to fellow don and fabulist C.S. Lewis: “All I remember about the start of The Hobbit is sitting correcting School Certificate papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children. On the blank leaf I scrawled: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' I did not and do not know why."

‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit‘

Romantic Poetry Session - 19 August, 2024

 

Four of the major Romantic Poets were on exhibit at this session: Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and Byron.  Women poets of the romantic era were included – Mary Robinson and Felicia Heymans, and one who belongs to the Victorian age of poetry, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. William Cullen Bryant was the only poet from outside Britain.

Collage of Romantic Poets – Byron, Hemans, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Robinson

The poems were all new and captivating. Keats marvelled at Byron:

Byron! how sweetly sad thy melody!

Attuning still the soul to tenderness,

Byron lamented the separation from his wife Milbanke, and especially from their daughter Ada. She was to become famous in her own right as the world’s first programmer – of an autonomous computing machine called the Difference Engine invented by Charles Babbage. Byron writes to Milbanke:

When her little hands shall press thee,

When her lip to thine is pressed,

Think of him whose prayer shall bless thee,

Think of him thy love had blessed!

Shelley – The Esdaile Notebook (the original volume)

Shelley – The Esdaile Notebook published in 1963

Shelley likewise is writing to his first wife Harriet from whom he soon separated. But before the break he wrote several poems filled with romantic sentiments in his Esdaile Notebook of 56 poems which remained unpublished until 1964. This one to Harriet tugs at the heartstrings:

For a heart as pure and a mind as free 

As ever gave lover, to thee I give,

And all that I ask in return from thee

Is to love like me and with me to live.

Wordsworth came alive with his sonnet, The World Is Too Much With Us, which emphasises humankind’s lack of attention to things that matter, instead being preoccupied with

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Modern time wasting on mobile phones

This provoked thought among the readers on similar but not identical activities in which moderns fritter away their time, ignoring Nature –  ‘we are out of tune,’ Wordsworth says. Joe was engaged to write a modernised version of Wordsworth’s sonnet referring to our Amazon buying, and our fixation on mobile phone screens. Which he has done and included in the blog below.

Setting aside the childhood poem Casabianca which everyone must have learned in middle school, Saras chose Felicia Hemans’ poem The Spanish Chapel. A mother who has lost a child is commiserating her in a chapel’s cemetery:

The soft lip's breath was fled,

And the bright ringlets hung so still—

  The lovely child was dead!

It is a tender moment when the mother is descried nearby, yielding

  An angel thus to Heaven!"

Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

From Hemans we veered to the marvellous poet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had the good fortune, though, disabled, to find a kindred spirit in another great poet, Robert Browning. The sonnets she wrote for him must rank as love poetry that will live forever. Fortunate are those young lovers even today who have read Sonnets from the Portuguese, in each other’s company. 

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight

For the ends of being and ideal grace.

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng – July 19,2024

 

The Garden Of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng, first edition Nov 2011 by Myrmidon Books

Aritomo Nakamura is the Emperor’s ex-gardener who was let go for some reason went to Malaya, and made his own garden, Yugiri, in the Cameron Highlands, a tea-growing area similar to our Munnar in Kerala. Later the heroine of the book, Yun Ling,  who was taken prisoner with her sister Yun Hong by the Japanese military in WWII, comes to live in the Cameron Highlands during the time of the Communist insurgency, and decides to build a Japanese garden in memory of her sister who suffered as a ‘comfort woman’ for the Japanese and was ultimately killed in a mine explosion.

Tea Growing in the Cameron Highlands, Malaysia

That leads to the unique association of Yun Ling with Nakamura Aritomo, who promises to teach her how to build a Japanese garden. They labour  with helpers daily and ultimately become emotionally close. Aritomo is not only a gardener but had established himself as a wood-block print artist, in the tradition of the great Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). The Great Wave off Kanagawa by him, is among the most well-known works of Japanese art. It is one of the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, a series of landscape prints made by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist.

Hokusai (c1831) 'The Great Wave' at Kanagawa – the stupendous work shows the great azure wave rising and flexing its claws over a dauntless little Fuji in the distance

Ukiyo-e is the genre of Japanese art that flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings of such subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk tales; travel scenes and landscapes; flora and fauna; and erotica. The term ukiyo-e (浮世絵) translates as 'picture[s] of the floating world.’

The novel deals at length with the ideals and aims of garden design in Japan, as these gardens get replicated in Malaysia. There are not only religious principles like Zen Buddhism, but philosophic principles of minimalistic design that pervade the structure of Japanese gardens. Rocks are distributed to emphasise some aspect of what is being commemorated in the garden. The planted trees are placed to extend the human imagination beyond the immediate physical limits. Ponds and basins of water are strategically located so that it is only upon accessing a definite point of eminence that a sudden view emerges, combining the far distant objects with the  surroundings.

Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco

The charm of restraint is an essential aspect. Beauty must be concealed so that it surprises the onlooker. The Sakuteiki (作庭記), or A Record of Garden Making, is the oldest known Japanese text on gardening practices in the shinden-zukuri (寝殿造り) estates, and dates from the late Heian period (794-1185). Aritomo in the present novel is the exponent of that tradition and brings it to bear upon the garden Yun Ling wants to design in memory of her sister, Yun Hong who perished in the war. He takes her on as an apprentice to construct the garden.

The horimono takes shape on Yun Ling's back – from the movie

Horimono refers in this novel to the practice of traditional tattooing in Japanese culture, usually describing full-body tattoos done in the traditional style. Considerable attention is given to horimono; it deepens the association between Yun Ling and Aritomo. The details of the design may also conceal something. Many ukiyo-e artists also did horimono, and the tattoo artist of such intricate body designs was called a horoshi. The multi-talented Aritomo is not only a gardener, but a ukiyo-e artist and a horoshi. In the concluding act of the novel Aritomo completes a horimono on the back of Yun Ling. It is an act of supreme artistry as well as amorous intimacy.

Poetry Session, June 14, 2024

It is marvellous to think a Sufi poet from the 13th century, Jalal al-Din Muḥammad Rumi, is a best-selling poet today. A death poem of his was recited, full of aphoristic couplets, translated by Farrukh Dhondy, the British writer of Parsi Indian origin. Rumi wrote his famous work, the Masnavi in six volumes over a period of 12 years. Here is a manuscript dating from 1461 of the first book:

First book of the six-volume Masnavi of Rumi, which was written over a period of 12 years

Rumi writes in the poem that was read:

The grave is not the sum of a life complete 

It is but the veil beyond which bride and groom retreat. 

A long poem by a forgotten poet Robert Service commemorated the final resting place of a gold prospector Sam McGee who was frozen stiff in the northern wilds of Alaska. He made his buddy promise to bury him in a warm place. It has a surprising end, written in a racy ballad metre.

Another forgotten poet Edward Thomas from the WWI era was resurrected to demonstrate the tender feeling he had for nature. His description of trees is surprising: 

The aspens at the cross-roads talk together

Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.

 

Aspens are one of the more popular forest trees in the West. They add a brilliant yellow glow to the collage of fall colors

Thomas talks about the silence of the woods and nature’s ability to captivate the meditative soul; this gives him a place among the important minor poets who preceded the great ferment of modernism. A wonderful paean he wrote for English words is a reminder that poets, above all, are devotees of words:

You English words?
…
I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
Precious as gold,

Our own Vikram Seth was represented in the session with two poems from his first book of poems, Mappings, published in 1980 by P. Lal’s Writer’s Workshop; that publication house is still going strong after 60 years, with P. Lal’s son, retired professor Ananda Lal, guiding it. The first works of authors as varied as Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Asif Currimbhoy and Ruskin Bond, came out in those distinctive hand-set, hand-printed and hand-bound covers with old saree fabrics.

Vikram Seth‘s Mappings, published by Writer's Workshop

Frank O’Hara was a seminal poet of New York City in the fifties and sixties when he became known as a poet and art critic. He met his longtime partner Vincent Warren, a handsome Canadian ballet dancer, in the summer of 1959. Warren became the inspiration for several of O'Hara's poems. We read a poem about the cityscape of New York detailing its life, much of it ordinary:
Negro stands in a doorway with a
toothpick, languorously agitating.
A blonde chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin.

Sometimes one has trouble finding the poetry in such lines.

But such trouble does not arise when you contemplate Matsuo Basho’s 17th century haikus. Six moments in nature, captured and frozen in the briefest of lines, were exhibited at the reading; here is one
How admirable!
To see lightning and not think
Life is fleeting

In Japanese:
inazuma ni
satoranu hito no
tattosa yo

Haiku by Basho ‘How admirable, to see lightning, and not think life is fleeting’

We are the fortunate few in KRG whose spirits are restored from time to time at these sessions. Read on.